The roll out of low cost broadband services has led to an ‘IP’ network revolution across factory, office and home. Ethernet has almost exclusively become the physical layer for all networking applications, whether they be industrial control, office routers or consumer equipment such as Home Gateways, VoIP phones or Set-Top-Boxes.
Ethernet has dominated due to the ease-of-use and open standard approach providing true interoperability between equipment in the field. By itself, Ethernet is not strictly a protocol yet it provides the lower ‘hardware’ layers for the higher layer software stacks such as TCP/IP or UDP. So, it would seem the task to network a device should be as simple as ‘bolting on’ an Ethernet transceiver and modifying the software. Indeed, this is basically true, however, the many different interfaces offered by today’s vast number of Processors and FPGAs often adds uncertainty.
So how do I interface my Ethernet PHY (transceiver), multi-port switch or controller to my chosen processor? This depends firstly, if the processor provides an integrated MAC (Media Access Control).